Q & A Repository

Subject: Wang in the Obsolete Computer Museum

Posted By: Thomas Junker
Date: 12/6/97 at 6:10 p.m.

In Response To: THE WANG VS IN MUSEUMS (Thomas Junker)

Subject: Wang in the Obsolete Computer Museum

Date: Sat, 6 Dec 1997 18:10:30 -0500

I was surprised to find your exhibit of a Wang VS in the Museum. There is no model given, so I can't pinpoint where it falls in the 24+ processor generations of the Wang VS line of computers.

In the interest of accurate information and to counteract the persistent urban legend that Wang computers are obsolete and that Wang has gone out of business, permit me to offer the following:

The model of computer you show in the Museum was likely capable in the mid-1980's of supporting 10-20 gb of "SMD" disk drives. VS computers equipped with telecommunications commonly make use of 56k and 64k bit/sec digital communication lines, although speeds were considerably slower in the mid-80's. Many models from 1985 onward, especially the larger ones, are still in operation around the world, numbering at least 10,000. All the large cabinet models since the 1985 VS300 are capable of CPU upgrade to 1996 and (next year) to 1998 levels of processor speed. There may be no other line of computers in the world that has been capable of in-box upgrade to achieve 5- and 10-fold performance increases 10-15 years after manufacture.

Wang is still in business, although its market presence contracted sharply in the period leading up to and following its 1992 bankruptcy. It emerged from that crisis as a leaner, cash-rich company making acquisitions and staking out a new area of business -- network services. Wang continues to support the VS line of computers and has introduced new models throughout the 1990's. The next one to be announced, in 1998, will be the VS18000 family, with a top performance some 70 times that of the original VS80 released in 1977. With some few exceptions of very early models all VS models are software compatible. It is common for customers to be running some application components that were compiled in the early-to-mid 1980's alongside software written and compiled this year.

Wang produced an earlier line of computers, the 2200 series, which were microcoded BASIC machines. About 65,000 were shipped, and between 100 and 200 are still under Wang maintenance around the world. Those machines are truly obsolete, but still manage to persist.

The VS line of computers was patterned after the IBM 360/370 line. They are 32-bit machines with an instruction set similar to that of the IBM prototype, but expanded to handle linked lists and stacks.

The VS OS is a multitasking, multiuser virtual memory OS. The first model, the VS80, was rated to support 32 users with a maximum total physical memory of 512K bytes. Try that on a PC! The latest model, the VS16850, can handle upward of 50-750 users and can accomodate up to 512mb of main memory and terabytes of SCSI disk storage, including RAID 7. Late model VS systems can be clustered using Wang's Resource Sharing Facility (RSF), a 100mbit/sec FDDI fibre token ring. Clustered systems can access each other's files, job queues and printers.

A few large VS customers running their businesses on these systems today are:

o The Colorado Lottery
o The Arkansas Dept. of Health
o The Hartford Insurance Group
o Mellon Mortgage Company
o Kent Electronics
o (other familiar names that I don't have at my fingertips)

There are about 300 Wang VS systems in South Korea. Many large VS users in Europe have already made the decision to stay with the VS into the 21st Century. Some large conversion efforts to more "modern" platforms such as unix have failed miserably due to gross underestimation of the robustness and capacity of the VS and its operating system. The VS OS supports transaction processing with commit and rollback at the OS level, while unix does not even have a native indexed file system. The VS supports file compression in the hardware instruction set, while unix systems typically burn large portions of their disk space holding uncompressed data. In the VS, all print files and most data files are compressed by default.

While the VS community is without doubt declining, Wang has recently committed to supporting the VS through the year 2007 as long as there are VS customers who want support and new products. Some VS models are unquestionably obsolete while others are unquestionably current and in widespread use. Since the same software runs on old and new models, the VS line cannot be said to be obsolete.

If you would like to see more information on the Wang VS line of computers, including complete tables of performance by model, see my Unofficial Wang VS Information Center on the WWW:

[URL no longer valid]

I'd be happy to discuss any of this with you by email.

Regards,

Thomas Junker

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